Please Write for Details (16 page)

“Try to paint the secret corridors of the heart,” he bawled so loudly they all jumped, even Gloria who had heard it before. “Paint the climate of joy, or the articulation of the stars. Paint of the way something feels in the hand. An apple, a knife or a breast. Pain the smell of sickness, or the cold pride of a bird song, or the dead spell of winter, getting the stink of rotten snow into it. But for the sake of God, don’t paint a barn or a tree or a horse.”

He tilted the big piece of white board flat, yanked the top off a bottle and poured a puddle of dark blue oil ink onto the white surface. He picked up the board and tilted it this way and that so that the ink ran back and forth, making its own patterns.

“Where do you start? Start with color. Color is your language. Color is a form of light. The juxtaposition of color and form. Don’t whine to me about communication. Communication is for newspapers. If you have to communicate, try to get in touch with yourself.” He upended the board on the easel, snatched up a great hairy brush and edited the random droolings of the ink.

“Where do you start? Start with an accidental. What the hell does this blue mean? What does blue mean to you? What little creak do you hear in your soul when you look at blue, blue, blue?”

“My goodness!” Dotsy Winkler murmured.

And he began to press fat blobs of opaque water colors out of their tubes, applying them directly to the painting, mixing his colors directly onto the surface as he worked, ranting at them, saying madnesses that, during the moment they were said, seemed to have meaning.

Miles Drummond was watching with his mouth half open. He looked up when there was a tap on his shoulder. Felipe Cedro was looking down at him with a certain amount of satisfaction. He said, “Señor, the men of the government are here.”

“What?” Miles whispered. “What men?”

“To see you, señor.”

As he headed for the lobby, Miles could hear the stentorian roars of Gambel Torrigan diminishing behind him. There were four men in Miles Drummond’s office. They all carried shabby briefcases and wore shiny, dark-blue suits, frayed collars and neckties dingy at the knot. They were all uniformly short. Two of them were very round and sweaty and two of them were very lean and dusty looking. They introduced themselves. One of the round ones, a Mr. Lopez, performed the introductions in curious English. Felipe had brought two more chairs and they all sat down. Briefcases were opened and files taken out.

“Now, sir,” Señor Lopez said, “it is to be seen that you are in operation of a hotel, sir. With not getting licenses.” He ticked them off on short thick fingers. “License for handling foods. License for selling the bed. Special license for commercial bus operationing. License for employment of staff hotel workers. Special license to lease and operating hotel.” Mr. Lopez paused and smiled broadly and lovingly at Miles. “Is very serious no
licensing, sir. Very very serious. Big fine, big penalty, much trouble, sir.”

Miles swallowed hard and smiled back and said, “There is some mistake. I am not operating a hotel. I am operating a school.” He switched to Spanish. “It is a school here. It is a school of painting. It is not a hotel.”

Lopez beamed even more widely. “Ah, sir. A school, sir. Then you do have the licensing for a school? Federal and also State of Morelos, sir.”

“I did not know it was necessary, gentlemen.”

Lopez kept smiling. “It is a school with students living here, sir, no?”

“Yes. That’s right. They live here.”

“Ah, sir. Then it is necessary the two big licenses for the school. And also the others, all the others as if it is a hotel operating also.”

Miles stared at him and said dully, “What?”

“Oh, yes, sir. big fines. Big penalties. You are citizen of Mexico, of course?”

“I am a
rentista
only,” Miles said hopelessly.

They all smiled at him and Lopez said, “Ah, sir. Now it is of much more difficult. Maybe impossible.”

“What will happen if it is impossible?”

“Just to close up everything only. Then fines and penalties, sir.”

At that moment Gloria Garvey appeared in the doorway. She glared at the four visitors and said, “Just what the hell is going on here, Drummy?”

He flapped a hand at the four men. “These people are going to close me up. Nobody thought of the licenses.”

Gloria stared harshly at Lopez until his smile faded away. “Drummy,” she said, “you scamper out of here and leave this to me. And close the damn door on your way out.”

Just as he closed the door he heard the beginning of a torrent of Gloria’s rough and ready Spanish. Miles paced up and down outside his office, hearing Gloria’s voice frequently climb to shrillness, hearing the excited babbling of the men. Gradually the noise quieted down. The door opened. The four men filed out. They each shook Miles’s hand, all of them smiling. They went out and climbed into an old Packard sedan and were driven away by a man in uniform.

“Come right back into your office, Drummy, and make out
a check to Gloria Garvey for two thousand and forty pesos. Right away, dear. It so happened I had a big chunk of cash in my purse today. That made it a little cheaper, I think.”

“What is this for? Are they going to close me up?”

“Of course not, dearie. The forty pesos is for a special, provisional, limited license that covers all the other licenses until the end of August.” She clicked her big white teeth at him meaningfully. “And the two thousand is the bite, Drummy. The
mordida
. A little gift to hasten the arrival of the special license.”

“Oh.” He made out the check and gave it to her. She waved it dry and popped it into her purse.

“What would you do without me, dear?”

“Thank you, Gloria. Thanks so much.”

“Lopez will bring the special license around in a week or so. And when he comes, you can be damn sure he’ll try to gouge some more out of you. If you give him nothing, you’ll hurt his pride and he may make trouble. If you give him too much, he’ll be back again. Drummy, do you think you’re capable of holding off just as long as you possibly can, and then give him a hundred pesos?”

“I … I think so, Gloria.”

“Tell him you’re losing money. Tell him the school was a bad idea. Be very reluctant. Then you won’t see him again, I hope.”

“All right, Gloria.”

“And for God’s sake, stop looking like a rabbit with an ulcer. Everything is just fine, Drummy. The food stinks and this is a very creepy building, but most of your people are delighted. They’re having a Big Adventure. Gam is currently confusing the hell out of them, but they’ll learn to love it.”

Gambel Torrigan finished his lecture and demonstration painting at four-fifteen on that Saturday afternoon, the first day of July and the first day of the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop. Those of the students who had been thoroughly cowed by the experience came meekly up to get a closer look at the vivid, dramatic and confusing painting he had done. Hildabeth McCaffrey and Dotsy Winkler were convinced they would feel far happier with the more gentle devices of Agnes Partridge Keeley. Monica Killdeering and Harvey Ardos felt tremendously stimulated. They felt as if some dangerous and exciting
new vista had been opened up to them. They didn’t know just what it was, or what to do about it. But it certainly seemed exciting. For Gil and Jeanie Wahl, sitting side by side, thighs and shoulders touching, hands tightly locked, while the demonstration had taken place, it had been a most curious interlude. They had sat there in such a humid and hypnoid awareness of each other that it was as if they had been alone in a sunlit patio. Torrigan had been a minor annoyance, a noisy, gesticulating puppet seen infrequently through the wrong end of a telescope. They had sat in their awareness of each other, breathing shallowly. When it ended they stirred and looked around in gentle confusion, as people awakened from half sleep. They stood up and, with unspoken accord, hands still clasped, began to walk quite slowly back toward their room. The expression on Jeanie’s round young health-poster face was almost stuporous, eyes heavy, mouth slack, throat too frail for the head’s heaviness. And she wavered slightly from side to side as she walked. Colonel Thomas C. Hildebrandt, U. S. A., Ret., had sat through Torrigan’s performance out of a soldier’s sense of duty. He had sat there like a chained water bird being proffered spoiled frogs. When it had ended he had added a single grace note to the patter of applause, a parade-ground snort of such dimension and resonance that Barbara Kilmer, seated beside him, had jumped and turned and looked at him in a startled way. “No terrain,” the colonel said, by way of apology. Paul Klauss, without seeming to do so, watched the lithe flex of Barbara’s waist as she turned toward the colonel. He felt relieved to learn, from Torrigan’s lecture, that he could perform quite adequately in Torrigan’s group. It was not necessary apparently to draw anything. One attempt to sketch a fountain had been enough. John Kemp went up and looked critically at what Torrigan had done during the demonstration. He wanted to be quite fair. He sensed that much of what Torrigan had said had been not only shocking, but quite meaningless. The man did have some interesting color values and a reasonably balanced composition when he was through. John Kemp had no patience with that kind of intellectual insularity which says, “If I can’t understand it, it’s no good.” He knew that nonrepresentational and abstract art had provided a creative and satisfying outlet for many painters who had become impatient with the restrictions of representational art. In his own work, though the source was always apparent, the treatment was abstract. He knew that public
understanding of abstract art was seriously handicapped by the pretentious asininity of most art criticism. Yet something about Torrigan’s work bothered him. There was a strange shallowness about it, a flatness. And suddenly he made what he felt was an apt guess. Perhaps the man couldn’t draw. Perhaps he had never served the very necessary apprenticeship in pure draftsmanship that must precede any venture into nonrepresentational work if it is to have any validity, if it is ever to be much more than the smear and scrawl of a child obsessed by color.

He was aware that Barbara Kilmer was standing beside him. Torrigan was a dozen feet away, talking to Monica and Harvey.

“What do you think?” he asked Barbara.

She frowned. “I don’t know what to think.”

“We get a choice. Furious philosophy with Torrigan, or candybox tops with Keeley.”

“Seems a little grim,” she said.

“Maybe we could form a splinter group. Self-education.”

“No. I think I’ll stay with Miss Keeley for a little while anyway. I don’t want to do the sort of thing she does, but I do want to get my hand and my eye working again. Then maybe I’ll switch.”

They could see, over the walls, high over the valley, the black afternoon clouds wreathing the peaks of Tres Cumbres. They could hear the thunder. Small quick breezes touched the patio, turning the leaves.

Gloria Garvey joined the two of them. It rather annoyed John Kemp that she should suddenly make Barbara Kilmer seem rather pallid and indistinct. “How did you people like the night-club act?” she asked.

“Quite impressive,” Kemp said.

“Gam makes quite a pitch.” She raised her voice. “Gam, you better get your junk under cover. It’s going to rain in about four minutes.” And then, smiling at John Kemp, she managed to turn and stand in such a way that Barbara Kilmer was dismissed and Barbara walked quietly away.

“A little Saturday fiesta seems to be shaping up, John Kemp. I looked in on it. The Texas lassies and your buddy named Barnum had their siestas and now they’re moving in on the tequila. In Park’s room. We’re invited. Interested?”

“Not very.”

“Good! Neither am I. There’s a much better idea. Friends of mine named Rick and Puss Daniels just finished a house at
a sort of suburb called Las Delicias. A housewarming is going on. Nothing fancied up, but suitably gay and mad and sort of come as you are.”

“I thought I’d write some letters, thanks.”

“My large friend, if you hang around here you’re going to be hooked into local festivities, and we agree they sound dull. And this ought to arouse your professional interest. It’s quite a house. It’s one hell of a house, in fact. Indoor pool. Outdoor pool. A lot of glass and crazy roof angles and movable walls and all that sort of crap. Come on along. I’ll show you some of the local characters.”

Barbara Kilmer was in the lobby as the rain started. She saw Gloria Garvey and John Kemp hurry out to the blue Jaguar. Thunder obscured the roar of the car as it drove out through the gates. She went to her room and started a letter to her parents. After a shockingly close click of lightning and
bam
of thunder, the lights went out. She lighted two candles, and continued her letter.

Park Barnum’s small room was crowded when the lights went out. He sat on his bed, leaning back against the wall, between Mary Jane and Bitsy, glass in hand, pleasantly glazed, wishing there was some Goddamn way he could stop thinking about Suzie and the twins. Torrigan, having made the mistake of demonstrating a feat of strength, was watching in awe and indignation as Monica Kildeering, in leotard, her legs perfect and unreal and like marble in the light of the naked bulb, did one-handed pushups in tireless tempo on the tile floor in the middle of the small room, while Harvey Ardos pridefully chanted the count.

The failure of the lights did not dismay the colonel. He had pumped up his gasoline lantern, adjusted the shade he had made for it, and sat reading
Lee’s Lieutenants
for what could have been the seventh time.

Miles Drummond was in the owner’s apartment, quarreling with Felipe Cedro over the cost of food. Felipe lighted a candle. He was intensely bored. Señor Drummond was very repetitive.

Hildabeth and Dotsy had been sitting in Dotsy’s room, knitting and lying about their grandchildren. When the lights went out they put the knitting aside and continued the conversation while they waited for them to go back on.

Gil and Jeanie Wahl slept in each other’s arms, a deep sweet sleep of utter content.

Agnes Partridge Keeley was tapping out business letters on the portable she had brought with her—the originals on her letterhead, the pink copy for her file, and the blue copy for her accountant. When the lights went out she said a word. And said it again. And sat in the dark wondering if Gambel Torrigan was a Communist, and, if so, what decisive thing could be done about it. She chained him in one of the damp dungeons in the bottom of her mind and began to do unspeakable things to him.